Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have read all of Gladwell's previous offerings and I must say this is by far his worst thus far. This book is unscientific, unoriginal and badly researched. Let me start with the non-science. Especially the title. The use of a term like "Outliers" would suggest that Gladwell has understood the meaning of that word in the statistical context. Instead, he bandied the word like any lay person would and classified anyone worth billions such as Rockefeller and Bill Gates as an "outlier" in the human population. Statistical probability does not preclude the existence of someone like Rockefeller or Gates. In fact, it is almost certain that given a sufficiently large population, you will have people like that. The only condition is that the bulk would fall in the middle of the distribution and a great minority should fall in either end. Gates is therefore not an outlier as such, but rather the expected result from chance. To be fair, Gladwell did note that the fortunes of such people have more to do with luck than innate ability. I would have no problem had Gladwell titled his book "Luck". Instead, he attempted to imbibe some false scientific credibility using a scientific term. Even the introductory definition of an outlier is incomplete. In any case, there are precious few scientific concepts in this book. As for originality, the book comprises mostly of bits and pieces that are well-known in the public domain. I give Gladwell credit for bringing them together in a nice easy-to-read form for the general population. However, none of the things he shared are really new. Last but not least, there are a lot of suppositions which are not well-backed by proper research or at least not properly stated as suppositions. In particular, I found it laughable that he classified Singapore as a centuries-old "rice paddy" country (neither the centuries-old part nor the rice-paddy part is true). Also, the justification of language as a rationale for mathematical ability is tenuous at best. It is far harder to write the Chinese characters for the numbers than the English versions. As far as I know, all countries use the arabic numeral system nowadays. Also, some of the "math-whiz" countries actually teach mathematics in English (e.g. Singapore). In conclusion, if you are looking for a book which tells you that while innate smarts have some effect, how far you get ahead depends on your circumstances, your culture, hard work and a good dose of luck, this is the book for you. But I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't know that already.